Jan 2026: Rhododendron Pie Spoilers > Likes and Comments

Please realize that if you have not finished the book yet, there could be spoilers.

Abigail asked:

1. The heroine in Rhododendron Pie feels out of place in her own family. Have other people had that experience? And what does it portend for the direction of the plot?

2. What do you think of Mrs. Laventie’s place in the family?

3. The notion of a rhododendron pie is pretty odd, especially for a child’s birthday. What does it tell us about the values of the Laventie family?

4. How did you interpret what the narrator said about Mr. Laventie’s trips abroad?

5. What role does Miss Finn play in the story?

Mrs. Laventie is very much in the background during a majority of the novel. In the end, we find her to be more of the outside observer of her family. She was much more behind the scenes with regards to her household duties that no one knew what she did.

Thank you for reading, Charlene!

The way Mrs. Laventie was handled really intrigued me. She was always there but overlooked by the others, who seemed to pay no attention to her as a person. Nobody asked her advice or asked how she was doing; nobody did anything for her (except the loyal servant, herself invisible). She was treated as a nonentity. But as that scene at the end showed, all the time she was there, performing her duties but silently stewing.

In retrospect, I realized that her husband went to Europe every year to have affairs and brought her back each time a pretty new coverlet as an apology. How humiliating to have to use them! A humiliation increased by the thought that nobody saw her as a person anymore, only an invalid—there was never any variation in the gift.

There’s also the symbolic aspect of a wounded, harmed person being placed at the center of the household, while nobody else recognizes that painful reality.

What I enjoy about the book is its understatement. It purports to be a light romance, but there are all these subtleties and an underlying rage against the fakeness of the family culture, expressed only indirectly via satirical comments. I’m sorry more members of the group didn’t read it.

The Laventie family put so much on intellectual qualities that in a way they never really had a family bond.

Yes! And what they valued most is what made them least human.

I read this a couple of years ago. It's definitely not an ordinary dysfunctional family, I found it a bit of a downer so did not reread.